Rethinking civilization: A new architecture for humanity

Stephen Heintz’s recent “A Logic for the Future” is a bold, sweeping essay that confronts our current era of existential turbulence — and dares to imagine a more just and resilient global order.

To me, what sets this piece apart is not just its ambition, but its tangible resolutions. Rather than simply critiquing the current system, Heintz proposes a comprehensive overhaul of global governance — from remaking the United Nations to codifying the rights of nature and future generations. To Heintz, the future we want to build is one rooted in pluralism, justice, and shared planetary stewardship.

At its core, it’s a piece that dares to use today’s chaos to ask: What if we redesigned the world order from scratch?

Key quote: “Readers of this paper may find some of the ideas presented to be idealistic or even utopian. But this essay is intended to address the question of what might be, not merely what can be. As proven throughout history, human consciousness endows us all with the ability to make changes that contribute to longer and better lives. The challenge of designing a better international system is a difficult one, but choosing to ignore the necessity of reform is a far greater failure than striving and falling short.”

The tyranny of time

I’m currently reading Adrian Bejan’s Time and Beauty, so I’ve been thinking more deeply about our relationship with time — when I came across Joe Zadeh’s masterful critique of timelines, clocks, and the invisible structures that govern our lives.

In The Tyranny of Time, Zadeh traces the strange story of how humanity came to worship the clock — standardizing it, globalizing it, and ultimately internalizing it as a tool not just of coordination, but of control.

His essay is a meditation on how modern life — through capitalism, colonialism, and technology — has severed time from nature. In many Indigenous cultures, time moves with seasons, tides, and flowering trees. But in ours, time is now something we manufacture, sell, and even weaponize.

Zadeh invites us to imagine another way: not living by the clock, but with the rhythm of the world. The question is no longer how much time do we have, but rather: What kind of time are we living in?

Key quote: “We discipline our lives by the time on the clock. Our working lives and wages are determined by it, and often our ‘free time’ is rigidly managed by it too. Broadly speaking, even our bodily functions are regulated by the clock: We usually eat our meals at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are hungry, go to sleep at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are tired and attribute more significance to the arresting tones of a clock alarm than the apparent rising of the sun at the center of our solar system. The fact that there is a strange shame in eating lunch before noon is a testament to the ways in which we have internalized the logic of the clock. We are ‘time-binding’ animals, as the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin put it in his 1987 book, Time Wars. ‘All of our perceptions of self and world are mediated by the way we imagine, explain, use and implement time.’”

OUTLAST field notes:

Walking backwards into the future

In several cultures — from the Aymara people of the Andes to parts of West Africa and Polynesia — time is not something we march into, but something we back into. The future is behind us, unseen. The past is in front — visible, knowable, studied.

In this worldview, we walk backward into the unknown, guided only by what we’ve already lived.

Why this matters for Outlast: In a world obsessed with forecasting, this philosophy offers a powerful reframing. It forces us to shift our perspective away from speculation and towards immersive study.

Longevity, then, is not about prediction — it’s about deep observation. Patterns leave trails. Success leaves residue. Memory is a map.

The path forward is illuminated by what we’ve already walked through.

A few more links I enjoyed:

Trends – Artificial Intelligence – Bond Capital

Key quote: “‍We set out to compile foundational trends related to AI. A starting collection of several disparate datapoints turned into this beast. As soon as we updated one chart, we often had to update another — a data game of whack-a-mole… a pattern that shows no sign of stopping … and will grow more complex as competition among tech incumbents, emerging attackers, and sovereigns accelerates. Vint Cerf, one of the ‘Founders of the Internet,’ said in 1999, ‘…they say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year — equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life.’ At the time, the pace of change catalyzed by the internet was unprecedented. Consider now that AI user and usage trending is ramping materially faster… and the machines can outpace us.”

Investment Evolution or Flexible Tactics? via John Huber

Key quote: “‍I think people overstate Buffett’s ‘evolution’ and assume he once bought cheap stocks and now only buys quality stocks. I think a lot of this is simply due to Buffett’s desire to share credit with Munger, who preferred the quality investments. While I’m sure Munger had some influence, Buffett was buying quality before he met Munger and actually never stopped buying the cheap stocks [in] special situations when they were big enough to make sense. His North Star wasn’t any sort of quality criteria, it was really just value that he understood.”

From the archives:

AI is Life – via Sara Imari Walker

Key quote: “A world in which machines acquire sufficient intelligence to replace biological life is the stuff of nightmares. But this fear of the artificiality of technology misses the potentially far-reaching role technologies may play in the evolutionary trajectories of living worlds.”